Glasses-free 3D HDTV imminent

Always felt those cumbersome glasses that come with 3D TVs were a deal-breaker for you? Well, no more! Electronics manufacturer Toshiba recently announced that it will be bringing it’s no-glasses-required 3D-enabled HDTV’s to market before the end of the year. The company had already achieved glasses-free 3D earlier, but was not able to produce resolutions higher than 1280 x 900. That’s all in the past now, though the new models will initially go for several thousand US Dollars. Probably not all that friendly on your budget, but a very nice improvement over current 3D HDTV offerings nevertheless.

Anime review kick-off: Gundam Seed C.E. 73: Stargazer

Welcome to our first ever anime review! We’ve recently decided to allow Anime to be covered on the site as well, as we feel that it’s a well-respected part of the gamer lifestyle. So expect more anime to pop up soon (probably after GamesCom 2010). For now, we hope you like our first attempt. Feedback is highly appreciated as always.

Stargazer is an anime that takes place in the gundam seed universe as a sidestory during a disasterous event in the gundam seed destiny series. An old, monumental space colony threatens to crash into planet earth, and the only option left appears to be to have it destroyed by the colonies’ military. The colony shatters into pieces however, and causes a massive meteor shower that ravages the planet. This event sparks aggression between the earth and the colonies, and sets the stage for the whole gundam seed destiny series.

In the middle of all this, DSSD, an independent scientific organization has just finished completing their new mobile suit for space exploration, and is in the midst of preparations for it’s launch into space for testing when three Gundams from an unknown organization start causing havoc.

Gundam Stargazer is a short sidestory anime with no impact on the main storyline, yet is considered by fans to have been a more compelling basis for the second gundam seed series than the actual Gundam Seed Destiny anime. And I’d have to agree. The second series is mostly the same story as the first, but viewed from the perspective of the colonies, whereas stargazer opens up a completely new and different storyline, while still tying into the events of the first Gundam Seed series.

Stargazer could have easily become a complete anime series of it’s own, with a different view within the Gundam Seed universe, and it’s a shame that this never happened, as the ending leaves much to the imagination. It’s story is compelling and interesting, but its length of 3 episodes is way too short, and it’s a bit of a waste that you only really get to see the Stargazer Gundam very late into the story. To me it felt like a teaser/pilot episode of sorts, similar to what they did with Gundam Unicorn. Both managed to captivate the audience, but left them wanting for more. With Unicorn, that will be coming eventually, but stargazer simply leaves you with your imagination.

The art style and look and feel are definitely different from the rest of the Gundam Seed anime, but this is a good thing. It has a much more high quality feel, and resembles Gundam 00 in many ways in this regard. The use of computer generated graphics is executed much better than any other Gundam Seed anime, it’s hardly noticeable, which can’t be said of the other anime.

Even though it’s rather short, I consider Gundam Stargazer to be one of the best Gundam series, and definitely worth watching if you’re a Gundam enthusiast like me. It provides an interesting view on the Gundam universe which is so well known for it’s big mecha battles and personal drama, and tries to do something different within that setting.

Maintenance notice

Dear visitors,

Due to scheduled maintenance, the website will be unavailable between 10 and 11PM GMT + 1 (Dutch local time). You will be able to access the forums during this time, however.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, and hope to see you all again after!

Sincerely,

the management

PS. Icon artwork by Sebastiaan de With who runs Cocoia

Edit:

It’s now 30 minutes later, and maintenance has been completed. Everything appears to be running just as smoothly as it has in the testing environment, but please contact staff immediately if you noticed anything going wonky, thanks!

The fall of Nintendo

“Nintendo, out of all these game companies?” you might wonder, and yes, it’s a seemingly odd thought at first, but let me explain this to you as we go along.

After the great video game crash in 1983, during which the entire gaming industry collapsed, Nintendo established the software licensing model that we all know these days; game developers pay money to Nintendo, and in return they get the development tools and hardware to create games. On the flip-side, Nintendo can perform a quality-check on the games for their platform, and make sure that all games live up to a certain quality criteria. You will never see nudity, or any sexually-flavored games on Nintendo platforms because of this (though, that being said, there are extremely rare exceptions). It mainly serves to keep junk out; which was the cause of the earlier mentioned great north american video game crash.

Since establishing this model, every developer and their cat has jumped aboard the bandwagon and Nintendo and it’s platforms and games have flourished, creating the birthplace for the likes of Mario, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Metroid, and F-Zero, games that many of use have come to love over the years. One thing that has always been clear to developers, though, was that Nintendo likes to favor well-established technology that’s cheap to come by, and has proven itself, as opposed to being on the cutting edge. The gameboy link cable for example has a striking resemblance with Firewire cables.

When looking across their product line, you can see they have been very consistent in using this approach with your very own eyes; The Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and Wii (just to name a few), are prefect examples of this interesting habit. I also think it’s safe to say that as a result of this, they have always been in second (or third) place in terms of hardware. Fortunately, we all know that their exclusive games have always been where their game platforms made the difference. The gamecube wasn’t special, but The Wind Waker and Metroid Prime were, the Wii wasn’t all that interesting, but Wii Sports and Mario Galaxy are, and the GBA was just a Super Nintendo, but then we saw Golden Sun, Advance wars, and Metroid Fusion. It’s all coming back to me now!, good stuff. Read more

Heavy Rain lacking innovation, doesn’t deserve the hype

Do you ever feel like you just don’t get it? Like everybody is running around you is going crazy over something, and all you see is garbage, yet you’re staring at the very same thing? Well, that’s the kind of feeling I’ve been getting recently with Heavy Rain. I saw the game at GamesCom, played the demo, read a lot online, and watched a ton of trailers, but I just don’t get it. Read more

Towards The Future: part one

It all started back in 2003. One day me and the rest of the neighborhood ( you know, back in the days when people still came over to play videogames together on the couch ) decided to go out and buy that game with the interesting-looking cover, sporting some anime-inspired artwork, and the magical word “online”. It was an RPG, and required a thing called a “nintendo broadband adapter”, or so it claimed, to play on the internet, with your gamecube. Wow, mind-blowing! At the time we still only had a 56k modem internet connection, and continuously wondered about those gaping holes on the bottom of our little purple videogame box of joy.

But then, we finally bought the game, Phantasy Star Online, it was called. It featured offline splitscreen multiplayer, still a common feature for console games back then, a singleplayer offline mode, and the ever-tempting online menu button.

At some point, we decided to buy a Broadband adapter, so that we could play mario kart in LAN mode, but when we got home, we instantly forgot all about mario kart and popped the PSO disk in, plugged in the adapter, and tried out that free one month of online play! Within a week it was impossible to get your hands on another broadband adapter; everybody in our street wanted one for PSO, and soon even neighboring towns were all-out of the little connection-peripheral.

At around the same time me and my brother finally managed to convince our dad into getting an ADSL connection, and from then on, we were absolutely hooked. We bought a second gamecube because my little brother and I didn’t want to take turns playing online, then a keyboard, which would later be complemented by an imported €80 ASCII keyboard-controller, a load of memorycards, and several copies of PSO.

So what is this ‘PSO’ you’ve been talking about?, I hear you thinking. PSO, now 10 years old, is the first-ever online multiplayer RPG game on any gaming console, and was a source of inspiration for modern games such as Monster Hunter, Lost Planet, and Guild Wars. Some say PSO, in turn, draws inspiration from Diablo.
Heavily influenced by popular japanese cartoon drawings called “manga”, the game is set in a sci-fi space exploration story, and truely shines in simplicity. It would even go as far as calling it an Online Arcade-RPG due to it’s simplicity in design and gameplay, and clearly shows a Sonic Team (the game’s developer) that is still getting the hang of creating 3D games.
PSO was first released on the Sega Dreamcast, but after the demise of the DC, PSO was ported to the Xbox and Gamecube, with an extra episode, quests, items, and received a large number of refinements.

Nisute Event: Game programming essentials 2

So what will we be covering?

The second session will focus mainly on use of functions, general rules of thumb when programming, object-oriented code, and putting those into practice with the material from the first session.

For those who are interested:

This second session will be held on Monday the 15th of February at 1pm (GMT+1/CEST), with a length of 2 hours.

With our unique look at the gaming industry, and all of the people we meet, we often hear our members and outsiders express their interrests in pursuing a career in game development or media. Interestingly, they all come to us with the same question, and so we’ve decided to set up an event to cater to part of this question: is making videogames something for me, and what does it take?At this point we have the knowledge for organizing a game programming essentials course in-house, and so that’s exactly what we’ve set up. For us, the goal of this 2-hour pilot-course is to see if there is enough interest from people to warrant organizing more sessions, and see if we can arrange some guest speakers on various topics.

Things to bring:

A laptop with windows xp/vista/7/mac os x

bloodshed dev-cpp or apple xcode (comes with your mac install dvd), depending on wether  you run windows or mac os x.

Please make sure to have these ready for use when you walk in the door!

Location:

NiSuTe International office
Street: Graaf Engelbertstraat 50
Postal: 5046 LW Tilburg, The Netherlands
Phone: +31135358331
Costs: €0

prior experience required:

some knowledge about variables, operators, and simple operations (covered in the first session). Don’t worry if you weren’t there though, you’ll do just fine!

Time & date:

Currently scheduled to start on Monday the 15th of February at 1pm (GMT+1/CEST), with a length of 2 hours.

Registration:

Registration prior to attending is mandatory, to do so, send an email to lketelaars at nisute . com specifying your name, and phone number, as well as any special requests such as language preferences (ie. you’d prefer it to be in English or Dutch). Emails can be sent in either Dutch or English, Book your reservation now, it’s free anyhow!

However, if you’ve signed up for the first session then you will not need to register again for this one.

Industry choosing iphone, abandoning wii?

I think the iPhone makes a difference in the videogame space in a sense where it allows the industry to re-invent itself. Let me explain to you why.

If anything over the past few months stood out to me in terms of news and announcements, then I’d have to go with this trend of big developers and publishers seemingly losing interest in Nintendo’s white box of fun and starting to show their love to Apple’s iPhone. We’ve all seen big name publishers statements, thought mostly informal, with regards to the slow game sales on the Wii. And where some developers switch to PS3/360 development, others turned to the iPhone (or both). EA, Sega, Capcom, Square Enix and others have all started creating iPhone games in one form or the other. Read more

Not quite there: Fairytale Fights

Dutch game developer Playlogic Games’ new title Fairytale fights certainly was a game that managed to catch our attention at GamesCom last year. I mean mix Fairytales with “kiddy” visuals, throw in some Happy Tree Friends and you’re sure to get some attention. So after our positive first impression at GC, we were pretty eager to spend some time with the game.

Roughly 4 months later and you can find the game on shelves at your local videogame retailer, so we figured it was about time to finally play through the full version.

Fairytale rights is a fantasy hack and slash game, released for windows computers, playstation3 and xbox 360 and has received the PEGI 16, and ESRB Mature ratings in europe and the US respectively (click on the ratings to view game-specific rating details). Having played the game extensively, I would highly recommend parents to not let kids below that age to play it. Now with that out of the way, let’s talk gameplay. Read more

Nisute Presents: Game programming essentials

Today I get to be the guy to proudly present to you a special event that we have been working on here at nisute. With our unique look at the gaming industry, and all of the people we meet, we often hear our members and outsiders express their interrests in pursuing a career in game development or media. Interestingly, they all come to us with the same question, and so we’ve decided to set up an event to cater to part of this question: is making videogames something for me, and what does it take?At this point we have the knowledge for organizing a game programming essentials course in-house, and so that’s exactly what we’ve set up. For us, the goal of this 2-hour pilot-course is to see if there is enough interest from people to warrant organizing more sessions, and if we can arrange some guest speakers on various topics. Read more

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